Anthony Louis Scarmolin was born in 1890 in
the northern Italian textile-producing town of Schio, near Padua, where his
father worked in the local industry. His father moved to America in 1900,
taking his family with him and settling in New Jersey. The elder Scarmolin also
provided his talented young son with his first instruction on the violin and,
it is thought, the piano.

At an early age Anthony Scarmolin showed
undeniable signs of talent. As a teenager he enrolled in New York's German
Conservatory of Music, where he continued his piano studies with Bertha Cahn.
At this time he also began to compose; his earliest works used a fascinating,
tortured chromaticism and occasionally crossed the line into what some call
atonality. Apparently the work of an autodidact, Scarmolin's earliest pieces
mystified his teachers. His early style, contemporaneous with Schoenberg's
early departures from tonality and with Bartók's String Quartet No. 1, did not survive their criticism. Why
he left this youthful voice behind, never to retrieve it in later works,
remains an unsolved mystery .It was therefore as a pianist that he graduated
from the conservatory. Sadly, as fate would have it, a debilitating hand
condition forced the cancellation of a planned Carnegie Hall début recital.
Although he eventually recovered, he abandoned the idea of a performing career.
Reshaping himself as a commercial composer, he threw himself into the
composition of sacred and light classical songs, pedagogical and salon music
for piano and easy choral works. These he sent to various publishers, who
gradually began to publish them. At the same time he continued to write
"serious" works, evidently harbouring the ambition of conquering the
stage. His first operas date from this period and one of them, The Interrupted Serenade, was later
submitted to the Metropolitan Opera by Beniamino Gigli, eventually to be
rejected by the programming committee. The earliest of the pieces recorded on
this album probably date from before World War I. At this time in his career
Scarmolin was less than fastidious with his record­keeping; the Three Miniatures must therefore be dated
by means of stylistic analysis. During the 1910s he wrote many orchestral
pieces in the "light classical" vein, and it is into this category
that these delightful little pieces fit. The atmospheric, and harmonically
static, Andante which opens the
set harks back to the earliest experimental stage in the composer's
development, when he was trying out complicated textures and rhythms. The
following two movements, a hornpipe and a polka, are filled with good cheer and
humour. They also show a slight lingering interest in novel instrumental
effects, among them col legno, when
in the second piece, the string-players strike the strings with the wood of the
bow.

From his adolescence too are a number of
virtuoso piano pieces in an impressionistic style. Two of these, Night at Sea and Snowdrift, along with the third piece, White Meadows, from considerably later
(1954), were orchestrated in 1995 by John Sichel and are recorded here as Three Preludes. Though widely separated in
time, the three pieces make a satisfying suite with their impressionistic
nature and their shared tonalities, as well as their characteristic use of slippery,
whole-tone harmonies. Night at Sea and
Snowdrift are, as their titles
imply, musical landscapes. The eventful piano originals make extensive use of
dynamic and textural contrast and exploit the entire range of the keyboard.
Arpeggios and glissandi are heavily used. The Satie-like White Meadows, on the other hand, is more
meditative and restrained. The orchestrational style, as is frequently the case
when one composer arranges the work of another, is neither that of the composer
(whose orchestral music tends to be much more texturally conservative than his
piano music) nor the orchestrator, but was rather modeled on that of some of
the composers whose scores Scarmolin owned and admired (Puccini, Respighi, and
Debussy, among others).

Scarmolin served with the U.S. Army in World
War I, playing the clarinet and, when possible, the piano, with the 320th Field
Artillery Band. He continued to write predominantly "marketable"
music during this time, adding patriotic songs to his repertory. Upon his
return from the army he found work as a band and orchestra director at Emerson
High School in Union City, New Jersey and served in this capacity, well-loved
by his students, for thirty years, until heart trouble forced an early
retirement in 1949. In 1926 he married a voice teacher and singer, Aida
Balasso, who devoted herself to her husband's career. The couple were childless
and travelled frequently to Italy.

During the 1920s and early 1930s Scarmolin
seems to have devoted himself even more to being commercially successful,
apparently making time by limiting his production of "art music." His
artistic ambitions seem to have reawakened about 1935, the year he composed his
First Symphony. From this time
on, though, he continued to compose quantities of pedagogical piano music, as
well as pieces for student ensembles of all kinds. He seems to have composed
almost out of nervous habit - he was one of those composers who constantly
scribbled on napkins and programmes - a kind of compulsive music-making that
was a release from everyday care rather than a reflection of any kind of inner
turmoil.

Scarmolin was a modest and private man who
kept his inner life to himself, more of an eighteenth century cut, perhaps,
than his Romantic melodic and harmonic language would lead one to suspect. Even
during the global trauma of World War II his titles reflect an insulation from
the outside world. The charming Variations
on a Folk Song, for instance, dates from 1942. This work may
possibly have had but one link to the raging war: the word "Italian"
was conspicuously omitted from the title, though the folk-song in question is la Lionesse, from the composer's native
Piedmont.

Some of Scarmolin's works bear opus numbers;
others do not. He seems to have been indiscriminate about assigning them, and
he did so without regard to the work being published or performed, or important
enough to merit the distinction. Scarmolin was lax in this practice and
occasionally assigned opus numbers retrospectively to earlier pieces, to bring
himself up to date. There are some early pieces with more than one opus number,
some opus numbers with more than one piece, and some opus numbers that seem to
have been skipped altogether. Far more common, however, are pieces which have
no opus number; the current catalogue of Scarmolin's works runs to about 1,150
pieces (many of them early­grade piano pieces), whereas his opus numbers go
only up to the 220s.

After the war's end, even after ill health
forced his retirement from teaching in 1949, Scarmolin continued to compose
compulsively, for commercial and artistic applications. His 1947 Invocation is one of his most ambitious
works, a seventeen-minute work of heroic style built around a ceremonial motif
of a falling fourth heard in the lower strings in the opening bars. Despite
contrasting themes of a lyrical nature, the mood continually returns to the
grave style of the opening. The coda of the work begins in a hushed fashion,
with a theme reminiscent of Richard Strauss's Death
and Transfiguration, before building to its triumphant ending. There
is no written clue to what is being invoked in this work, but Scarmolin was a
religious man and it is possible that in this case he was addressing his
deepest artistic ambitions.

A year after Invocation Scarmolin produced the most dramatically sound of
his eight operas, The Caliph, set
to a wry libretto by Carleton Mantanye and based on a story by Justin Hundley
McCarthy. The story is a fable set in the time of Haroun-al-Rashid, the great
eighth-century Caliph in Baghdad. The Dance,
recorded here, is performed by the female lead, Dilidilan, a captive
of the Caliph (and secretly loved by him). When an overheated adolescent street
urchin, Ali Hassan, sees Dilidilan through an open window, he enters the house
to court her, unaware of the real owner. Ali Hassan is caught in the act by the
Caliph, who orders his captive to dance for the young man and strikes a
bargain. after the dance, Ali Hassan may leave the house - alone - for good,
or, if he wishes, he may marry Dilidilan - but if he does, after one night with
her he will be decapitated and his body thrown in the Tigris. Following the Dance, Ali Hassan overcomes his ardour and
leaves with some haste. The Caliph then confesses his love, and Dilidilan
admits that she too has fallen in love with him - and they live happily ever
after.

The
Sunlit Pool is a
brief tone-poem dating from December 1951. The musical language, like that of
many of his early orchestral works, resembles film-scores of the era.
Comfortably tonal with an occasional use of the whole-tone scale, this quietly
colourful work ends with a tasteful dissonance, a lowered sixth, heard through
the final E major tonic chord.

In subsequent years Scarmolin' s harmonic
language began to change somewhat. Though he never returned to the
expressionistic textures - or moods of his first works, he did begin to
experiment with a greater degree of chromaticism. A somewhat astringent, though
always conservative, exploitation of harmony comes passionately to the fore in Arioso for string orchestra, written in
1953.

Scarmolin's late chromaticism is most in
evidence in the latest work included here, the 1964 Prelude. Cloaked in his usual lush film-score style are some
new features in Scarmolin's writing: series of descending unison fourths in the
xylophone and pizzicato strings; alternating chromatic and whole-tone passages;
astringent use of modality (at the close). This brooding work sounds with a
strangely muted dramatic character which suggests a hidden programme.

The same unstable harmonic palette is
evident in the other work from the 1960s included, the brisk and extrovert Concert Piece for Trumpet and Strings, composed
in 1962. A more cheerful work than the Prelude,
the Concert Piece exists
also in a version for trumpet and piano, suggesting that it was intended to be
marketed as a contest piece.

Scarmolin died in 1969, and his widow died
in 1987. Since that time the A. Louis Scarmolin Trust has been involved in
rediscovering and promoting his works, and in gathering the details of his
life. I am greatly indebted to trustees past and present, including Margery
Stomme Selden, John Hamel, and Helen Benham, for the work they have done
piecing together the biography of the composer. More detailed biographical work
is in progress and. it is to be hoped, further recordings of Scarmolin's
hitherto unheard works.

@ 1998 John Sichel

Joel Eric Suben
Joel Eric Suben has
conducted first performances and commercial recordings of over 150 works by
American and European composers, among them Pulitzer Prize winners Roger
Sessions and Leslie Bassett. A frequent guest conductor of major Central
European orchestras, he recorded, in the 1995 and 1996 seasons alone, over
eleven hours of symphonic music with four different European orchestras for six
different record labels Suben studied conducting with Jacques-Louis Monod,
Witold Rowicki, Otmar Suitner, and Sergiu Celibidache. While still a student,
he directed the first Boston performances of Service
Sacre by Oarius Milhaud with members of the Opera Orchestra of
Boston. He was a finalist in the 1976 Hans Haring Conducting Competition of the
Austrian Radio at Salzburg, and after his 1977 début with the American Symphony
Orchestra in New York, won a Fulbright scholarship for advanced study in
Poland, where he devoted all of 1978 to organizing performances of American
music. Suben' s activities as a composer include some sixty published works.
Currently he serves as Music Advisor of the Wellesley Philharmonic in
Massachusetts.

John Sichel
John Sichel, in addition
to his duties as a Trustee of the A Louis Scarmolin Trust, is also a composer
with a doctorate from the Yale School of Music His recent works include chamber
and orchestral music and a large-scale choral song-cycle, Songs from the Dominion of Arrogance. He
lives in New Jersey and is on the faculties of Brookdale Community and Kean
Colleges

Slovak Radio
Symphony Orchestra
The Slovak Radio
Symphony Orchestra of Bratislava, the oldest symphonic ensemble in Slovakia,
was founded in 1929 through the efforts of Milos Ruppeldt and Oskar Nedbal,
prominent figures in Slovak musical circles. Ondrej Lenard was appointed its
conductor in 1970. Under its present conductor-in-chief Robert Stankovsky the
orchestra regularly tours throughout Europe and the Far East, performing most
recently in Japan and South Korea

Janacek
Philharmonic Orchestra
The Janacek
Philhamlonic Orchestra was founded in the 1950s as a radio orchestra in
Ostrava, a major urban centre in the Eastern Moravian region of the Czech
Republic Frequent tours in several European countries, the United States, and
Japan have established the ensemble as one of the major Czech orchestras.